मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Tuesday, March 20, 2018

'घरकुली' एकटी आणि अडकलेली 'कुलवधू'...Henrik Ibsen@190

#HenrikIbsen190
Today March 20 2018 is 190th birth anniversary of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

Ibsen's 'A Doll's House', 1879 became a very popular play in Maharashtra of 20th century.  The play  was translated into Marathi - Gharkul (घरकुल ), 1941 by Anant Kanekar (अनंत काणेकर). Also M G Rangnekar's (मो.ग.रांगणेकर) play 'Kulvadhu' (कुलवधू) is inspired by it.

I have also felt that Jabbar Patel's (जब्बार पटेल), 1982 Marathi movie 'Umbartha' (उंबरठा )- featuring brilliantly acted Nora by Smita Pail (स्मिता पाटील)- was influenced by it.

This is how Ibsen's play ends: 

"...Nora (taking her bag). Ah, Torvald, the most wonderful thing of all would have to happen.

Helmer. Tell me what that would be!
Nora. Both you and I would have to be so changed that—. Oh,
Torvald, I don‘t believe any longer in wonderful things happening.
Helmer. But I will believe in it. Tell me? So changed that—?
Nora. That our life together would be a real wedlock. Good‐bye. (She goes out through the hall.)
Helmer (sinks down on a chair at the door and buries his face in his hands). Nora! Nora! (Looks round, and rises.) Empty. She is gone. (Ahope flashes across his mind.) The most wonderful thing of all—?
(The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.)"

I read the play while in school and it made a deep impression on me. 

Hilton Als says in The New Yorker, March 10 2014:
"...Actually, part of what makes the story feel so desperate and urgent in our hearts—we never want it to end—is that it so resembles life’s rhythms, with its various elisions and polite misdeeds and yearnings, and yet it’s better than reality, since “A Doll’s House” cannot be explained away, or treated merely as a distant object; once it enters our consciousness, it sweeps us up in its emotional irresolution. It is a knowing work but an innocent one.."

The most wonderful thing I read about it was: The sound of a door shutting was not just heard below but all over Europe!

As I have said earlier on this blog,  I was always scared in my childhood if mother would do Nora some day and later I had the same fear about my wife. 

Hilton Als concludes  his review with these words: "...Before Nora leaves, she tells Torvald that he’s a stranger to her, and she can’t live in a house with a stranger. But that’s not true. Torvald was Nora’s self, or that part of herself which was once ravenous for the security that comes from being a citizen of a limited, calculable world."

I agree with Mr. Als: Most of us want to be a citizen of a limited, calculable world.

                                                             Isolated and trapped?
'Room in New York', 1932
Artist: Edward Hopper (1882-1967)

Gail Levin, ‘Edward Hopper: the art and the artist’, 1980:
“...In ‘Room in New York’, an oil painting of 1932, a man reads his newspaper, while the woman he is ignoring turns halfheartedly toward a piano and picks out a tune. The viewer, looking in through the window, has been assigned the role of voyeur...”
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